miercuri, 7 februarie 2018

Grecia

Interesting article on post- referendum Greece...
Excerpts: "In May, likely for the first time in the post-war history of
the Western world, a national parliament willingly ceded what remained
of its country’s sovereignty, essentially voting itself obsolete. This
development, however, did not make headlines in the global news cycle
and was also ignored by most of the purportedly “leftist” media.
The country in question is Greece, where a 7,500-page omnibus bill was
just passed, without any parliamentary debate, transferring control over
all of the country’s public assets to a fund controlled by the European
Stability Mechanism, for the next 99 years. This includes all public
infrastructure, harbors, airports, public beaches, and natural
resources, all passed to the control of the ESM, a non-democratic,
supranational body which answers to no parliamentary or elected body.
Within this same bill, the “Greek” parliament also rendered itself
voteless: the legislation annuls the role of the parliament to create a
national budget or to pass tax legislation.
These decisions
will now be made automatically, at the behest of the European Union: if
fiscal targets set by the EU, the IMF, and the ESM are not met,
automatic “cuts” will be activated, without any parliamentary debate,
which could slash anything from social spending, to salaries and
pensions. In earlier legislation, the Greek parliament agreed to submit
all pending bills to the “troika” for approval. For historical
precedent, one needs to look no further than the “Enabling Act” passed
by the Reichstag in 1933, where the German parliament voted away its
right to exercise legislative power, transferring absolute power to
govern and to pass laws, including unconstitutional laws, to Chancellor
Adolf Hitler.
The Greek omnibus bill was preceded by another
piece of legislation, “reforming” Greece’s pension system through the
enactment of further cuts to pensions, while increasing taxes almost
entirely across the board. Despite government lies to the contrary,
these cuts are regressive and will disproportionately impact the poorer
strata of society: the basic pension has been cut to 345 euro per month,
supplementary pensions to poor individuals have been eliminated, the
value-added tax on many basic goods has been raised to 24%, the number
of households which qualify for heating oil subsidies has been slashed
in half while taxes on oil and fuel have again been increased, co-pays
on prescription drugs covered by public health insurance have been hiked
by 25%, employees’ contributions to the social security fund have been
raised (effectively lowering salaries), special taxes have been
introduced on coffee and alcoholic beverages, while Greece’s suffering
small businesses have been saddled with an increase in their tax rate
from 26% to 29%...."
"The economic crisis in Greece has typically
been blamed on “lazy” and “unproductive” Greeks who supposedly refused
to work...."
"What has gone unsaid by both the Greek and
international media are the true origins and contributors to the Greek
crisis. These factors include the manipulation, by Goldman Sachs, of
Greece’s debt and deficit figures through a series of swaps and
derivatives, hiding the true figures in circumvention of EU Maastricht
criteria for admission into the Eurozone, for a tidy profit. Indeed, a
piece of often-repeated mythology was that Greece was the only country
which misbehaved by “lying” to enter the Eurozone. In fact, Goldman
Sachs as well as J.P. Morgan and other major banks, helped Italy and
other countries “lie” as well, while the role of swaps and derivatives
in bringing about the global financial meltdown of 2007-2008 is well
known. ..."
"Another cause of the crisis is the euro itself. The
euro is a debt instrument, produced by a private bank (the European
Central Bank) accountable to no government, and lent to member-states
such as Greece. The concept of the European common currency was first
proposed by economist Robert Mundell, who is also known as the father of
“supply-side” economics, and who, in an interview with Greg Palast, had
the following to say about the true objectives of the euro: “It puts
monetary policy out of the reach of politicians, and without fiscal
policy, the only way nations can compete is by the competitive reduction
of rules on business.” The euro was created to strip fiscal and
monetary policy-making ability from national governments, leaving them
without the ability to increase stimulus spending or devalue their
national currency to regain competitiveness. The only option left is
austerity and deregulation...."
"What has happened in Greece, therefore, is not an accident or a “failure” of the euro. It was the goal..."
"European Union membership has often been credited with Greece’s
economic growth in the period between 1981-2009. What is less often
said is that this period coincided with a tremendous growth in
unemployment in Greece, a wholesale attack on Greece’s industrial base
as Greek industries were shuttered or swallowed up by multinationals,
while Greek agriculture was decimated by the EU’s “Common Agricultural
Policy,” which dictated to farmers what to grow, what not to grow, and
what Greece could or could not export. Greece’s self-sustainability in
many sectors of food production was decimated, leading to an increasing
reliance on imports (helped along by strong marketing of the “European
way of life” and desire for “foreign” products). EU funds for major
public works projects usually made their way back to European banks and
firms such as Siemens, which landed the major contracts to construct
these projects, while Greek taxpayers were saddled with the bill...."
"This is the truth about Greece. There is no European dream—but instead
a European nightmare. There is no recovery. Greece is not an
independent or sovereign country, but a debt colony of the West—a
reality which much of the third world is already quite familiar with,
and which is very much in the process of being imported to the “first
world” as well."